Traces of Inspiration is the personal weblog of Adam Darowski, a daddy of two and a User Experience Designer for BatchBlue Software. (more about Adam)
We launched a major code push to BatchBook, our small business CRM, last night. We tend to push code every week, but we held off last week. That means this week’s was chock full of great stuff for our users.
We pushed it overnight. I checked the forums this morning, and before we even posted anything about it this message came in:
Oh, WOW!
You guys are AMAZING! Logged in this morning, totally crabby about needing to work and watching SNOW fall, and I see that you’ve completely pimped the dashboard in fabulous ways! I can now batch-tag, procrastinate, batch complete and a whole lot more.
Thanks for turning my gloom into 
today!
-Robin
Never before have I worked anywhere that I had direct contact with users like this. It is, by far, the best part of the job. I love it!
Wanna leave a comment?
Apparently, some companies feel that their in-house designers shouldn’t do side work. This baffles me. A friend recently explained this by saying his company feels like time spent doing side work is “time that should be spent working on [the company's projects].”
Do these companies have a problem with their employees watching TV in their downtime? Reading a book? Taking a class? No? Wouldn’t that time also be better spent working on the company’s projects?
I’m fortunate enough to be with a wonderful organization that realizes—even appreciates—that employees have interests outside of work. What some companies seem to struggle with is when your interests outside of work are similar to what you actually do for work.
I design for work. I design as a hobby. I tinker with techy stuff for work. I tinker with techy stuff as a hobby. I blog, tweet, and consume media for work. And also in my free time.
The truth is, you can’t work on the same projects all day, every day. Not only can it get monotonous, you can slip into a comfortable routine, repeating the same solutions and employing the same techniques. Sometimes building a site for a friend can give you that little burst of excitement that makes you remember why you love what you do in the first place.
This past summer, I picked up a bit of freelance work. It started as a “right thing at the right time” thing. A couple people I knew needed work done the same week I was planning to take a week off. Both clients (and I) were extremely pleased with the results, so I’ve done a little bit here and there since then. Not much (time is always tight lately), but just enough to benefit me in a number of ways. Such as:
Using different techniques
For one project, I was asked to mark up & style some layouts that are nothing like what I do for BatchBook. Not better, not worse, just a completely different domain. I like how simple BatchBook’s CSS is, but in this case I needed to bust out some new techniques. I even used CSS properties I had never used before. Of course, some of these new techniques were used for the BatchBook redesign. I call that education. I just happened to get a bit of money while essentially training for the day job.
A different development environment
When you work on the same product every day like I do, after a while it might feel like “the way you do things” is set in stone. It’s probably not.
When you pick up freelance work, you’re either starting things completely from scratch or working within somebody else’s development environment. In the first case, you have a clean slate and can do things in the most efficient way possible. Likely, you’ll make decisions that you want to bring back to your other work, whether it is how you set up your CSS, name your files, whatever. When working with somebody else’s code, it shows you how other people do things. There will be some “wow, we should totally do it that way” moments mixed in with “wow, I’m glad we don’t do that like they did”.
Expanding your network
Just through the little bit of side work I’ve done, I now have some additional contacts that I could call in for a number of reasons. And I’m not just talking about if either one of you needs a job down the line. I’m talking about sharing ideas and feedback, too. For example, I’ve now got a new technique to try and trick FireFox 2 into accepting inline-block. And I got a nice message from a developer that received my markup:
I just wanted to thank you for doing such a great job with the markup for the forum page you did for us. It was really easy to integrate it into the views we have…you did some very nice work.
At BatchBlue, there is certainly no shortage of “awesome job on this” notes. But to hear it from someone you don’t work with every day is always nice.
Extra money
Well… there’s that, too.
And perhaps that’s where some companies get uncomfortable. You’re essentially shopping the same services they’re paying you for to other companies. But the way I look at it, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. And as long as you’re getting your work done on time and at high quality, what’s the problem?
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Man, sounds like I missed out on a blast at Rails Rumble 2008. What’s Rails Rumble?
Spend the weekend of October 18th and 19th with us, designing, developing, and deploying the micro application you’ve been dreaming about.
So, eat burritos and code for an entire weekend. One of these days, I’ll be able to pull something like that off.
This year, Providence Geeks rock stars Matt Gillooly (@mattgillooly), Alex Taylor (@goldenmeanie), TJ Sondermann (@sondernagle) and Steve Babigian (@k00k) formed a team. And they came up with something awesome.
Twalala is a web-based Twitter client (I just happen to be running it as a site-specific browser using Fluid.app in the screenshot above). Why does the world need another Twitter client? Because this one solves a problem that nobody else does.
Twalala is “Twitter with a mute button”. Why would you want to mute something in Twitter? Here are a few examples I can come up with:
- You don’t want to hear anything about a specific movie/tv show until you’ve seen it. You can add “Iron Man” or “LOST” to your mute phrases and nothing containing those words will show up in your stream.
- You’re like me and hate automated messages that come from other services. Find the text that is always in those (like “Welcome new followers:”) and cut them from your stream.
- Maybe you feel obligated to follow that reeeeeeally annoying person that’s new to Twitter. Well, you can, then mute them, and they’ll be none the wiser. Until they ask you what you thought of that tweet…
Here’s where you set your muting preferences:
“No Thanks” includes phrases you want cut from your stream. “I Didn’t Mean You!” is a whitelist. You can add phrases or usernames that will be allowed through, even if other parts of the message are muted per the filters above it. Finally, “Take a Timeout” mutes everything by a specific user.
When something is white-listed through the “I Didn’t Mean You!” portion, it is highlighted in your stream (see my “twalala” tweet from the first screenshot). Very cool for your ego, when you can easily see if someone mentions you or your company.
After just two days of development, Twalala is surprisingly robust. Every time I accessed it over the weekend, something was new, tweaked, or fixed. Of course, there are still a few things missing to make me completely ditch Hahlo, but I’m sure they’re coming. Those things are:
- A replies view
- The ability to view DMs sent and received
- A favorite button next to each Tweet
- Hyperlinked hashtags (even if it just sent me off to the search.twitter interface, though integrated would be cool)
I love where this is headed, though. It even looks great on iPhone after a double-tap (one of my requirements for a Twitter client is consistent user experience on iPhone and in-browser).
Great job, guys!
Please, give Twalala a try.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote that I was entering WEEI’s Next Great Sports Blogger contest. Well, I found out yesterday that I didn’t make the cut. I admit, I’m not your typical sports blogger, focusing instead on more arcane (and to me, interesting) topics. Would have been nice to get the gig, but it wasn’t meant to be. Below is the submission that I sent along to WEEI. I’d love to hear what you think!
Imagine if we never saw Manny Delcarmen pitch.
Okay, maybe that didn’t catch you. I’ll try again.
Imagine if we never had to face Mariano Rivera.
Thirty years before Dr. Bill Morgan sutured Curt Schilling’s ankle, Dr. Frank Jobe performed a procedure that altered the future of baseball. Dr. Jobe took a ligament from Tommy John’s right (non-pitching) arm and inserted it in his left elbow.
In an interview with WEEI on September 10th, Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus mentioned that no pitcher who had Tommy John surgery is in the Hall of Fame (though either John Smoltz or Rivera will be the first). What caught my attention is that he went on to say that he believed Jobe himself should be in the Hall for this contribution to the game.
Sound crazy? It isn’t without precedent. There actually is an “Executives/Pioneers” group in the Hall. Of the group’s 26 inductees, most are executives. But there are some pure pioneers. Ware, MA native Candy Cummings, for example, was elected for inventing the curveball. Early sportswriter Henry Chadwick—creator of the box score and the first baseball statistics—is enshrined.
Jobe’s case goes beyond elbow reconstruction. In a CNN Money article, Chris Isidore writes “He also was an innovator in repairing shoulders and knees. And his innovation that gets no attention but has had great impact on the game was the rehabilitation process he and his partners devised for athletes recovering from surgery.”
Upon bringing Jobe back for a 44th season in 2008, Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt said “If ever a person had Hall of Fame credentials, it is this history-making medical pioneer.”
Not only are Delcarmen and Paul Byrd current Sox who have undergone the procedure, pitching coach John Farrell also did. Kyle Snyder, who appeared in two April games before being designated for assignment, had it as a minor leaguer.
Among 2007 Red Sox, Brendan Donnelly ended his short stint in Boston with an appointment for a Tommy John surgery. He returned this season with Cleveland.
Oh, and Eric Gagn√©, but let’s not talk about him.
Rivera and Smoltz aren’t the only big names. After his magical rookie year in 1998, Kerry Wood had it. Following his record of saves in 54 consecutive chances (while with the Sox), Tom Gordon needed the TJ. And let’s not forget it was against Boston (with Texas) that Jose Canseco took the hill to pitch the only game of his career. The appearance resulted in a 27.00 ERA and Tommy John surgery.
Many feel that Marvin Miller should be inducted for ushering in the era of free agency. Like Jobe, Miller never set a foot on a pitcher’s mound or in a batter’s box, but his influence on the game has been enormous.
If Jobe had devised the groundbreaking procedure just eight years earlier, imagine the career numbers we would have seen out of Sandy Koufax…
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As a designer, I probably should be writing more here about the design I’ve been doing. Well, it’s time to give you an update.
BatchBook Redesign
A week and a half ago, I announced over at the BatchBlue Blog that we finished a redesign of BatchBook, our small business CRM.
Here’s how it looks:
In the blog post, I talked about the main goals of the redesign, such as a better use of space, lightening up the design, making the app faster, and setting up for some more future improvements.
The redesign was an incredibly fun process, with the majority of the redesign happening over five days. The rest was just tweaks, special cases, and browser compatibility stuff. The first step when I started redesigning was to DELETE. I deleted a LOT of code.
I love CSS, but I’ve always tended to be a play-it-safe kind of guy. I use simple styles that won’t run into cross-browser issues and tend to stick with what works. Well, this was an opportunity to try some new things. First came the buttons.
The buttons use CSS sprites. So, I have one file called buttons.png (a nice 32-bit transparent png) that contains every button in the app. All buttons in the application call that same file (but since it’s already cached, it’s much faster!) and then only show a part of the image (as defined with background-position).
I ran into some issues and learned a decent amount while playing with the buttons. Here are some takeaways:
- A
<button> will inherit styles differently than an <a> link. The <a> will inherit font-family, font-size and others from styles applied to the <body> tag. The <button> tag, however, needs those properties defined specifically using button in the selector.
border-radius works like a dream in FireFox 3. It doesn’t work at all in Internet Explorer (of course). In Firefox 2, it works, but looks like poo. And Safari… it looks awesome, except that strangely it won’t apply to a <button> (I found that odd since FF2 and FF3 will do that).display: inline-block; is a wonderful thing—and it works in Firefox 3, Safari, AND Internet Explorer 7. We don’t support IE6, so it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work. But, go figure, the problematic browser in this case was Firefox 2. It doesn’t support inline-block. Very frustrating. I tried some hacks, but none worked well enough. So, I had to resort to unnecessary floating.
Another favorite part of this redesign was preporation for allowing user skinning. I went through the styles and commented what colors would be user definable. I set those up in a separate override style sheet. We haven’t hooked up the feature yet, but just playing with it locally has me very excited about allowing people to conform the product to their company color scheme.
If you haven’t checked out the slideshow of the redesign on Flickr, please take a look. I’d love to hear what you think!
BatchBlue.com Redesign
Instead of taking a rest after a major redesign, I embarked on another. This one wasn’t quite as big—and it also isn’t completely done yet. But on Sunday afternoon (right after we hit Mashable), we launched the redesign of BatchBlue.com.
We ran the old design through some user testing—both via Twitter and in person. We noticed some trends emerge and worked quickly to fix them. A lot changed, but here are the highlights:
- It’s wider! I now have 200 extra pixels to work with. This makes me very happy.
- The rounded corners in the header and footer (and some within the page) are long gone.
- We’ve got a new header that more clearly talks about key benefits of the application.
- The bulleted lists (which were far more popular than I would have guessed according to our tests) have shifted from the five tabs of BatchBook to the three main tasks you accomplish with BatchBook
- We added personas, so you can get an idea of who BatchBook is for and what they’d use it for. But not too much info to digest.
- We’ve written some fantastic and comprehensive Blue Papers (like a white paper, but blue!). it was time to bubble these free resources to the home page. (I worked on the Social Media for Small Business one.)
A lot of other things changed inside the app, but all the really cool stuff is on the home page. We, of course, have more updates coming up that I can’t wait to talk about.
So, that’s it! That’s what I’ve been up to! I’d love to hear your feedback.
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